Feature - Near-death experience changes atheist forever

Published: 10 April 2012

Howard Storm pictured with his wife, Marcia

---

Howard Storm was an atheist until he had an extraordinary near-death experience. After that, everything changed. Indeed, he is now a Christian minister. His book, My Descent into Death, shot to prominence globally after the novelist Anne Rice called it “a book you devour from cover to cover, and pass on to others,” reports the Catholic Herald.

She added that “Storm was meant to write it and we were meant to read it.”

Storm recently spoke to me from his home in Kentucky. He recounted going out to San Francisco in 1967, aged 19, in pursuit of the hippy dream.

“We earnestly were going to create a culture of peace and love,” he says, but “because it was so hedonistic and anarchistic it was doomed to failure. We soon began to see our contemporaries being destroyed by the excesses of drugs and sexuality.”

Disillusioned by hippiedom, religion and mainstream American society, he became increasingly nihilistic. He says he turned to “total narcissism: I’m no longer interested in changing the world … I’m going to live for myself.”

Storm rose through academia and took a job as a professor of art in Kentucky where he says that the overwhelming majority of the faculty were atheists and hedonists.

“Being cynical gives you a false and inflated sense of superiority,” he says. “You can look down on all the ignorant fools who go to church and believe in religion.